Why I Never Watched House of Cards
The problem with “House of Cards” is it paints everyone in Washington with the same poison brush. I suspected it would bad for our brand from the start, but tuned in for the first season out of curiosity. I turned off the first episode after Frank Underwood killed a dog with his bare hands. After a year of persuading, friends talked me out of my boycott. I gritted my teeth through three more episodes, until Frank Underwood was in bed with a 20-something female reporter 30 years his junior, who was calling her dad to wish him a happy Father’s Day while the Congressman was ripping her clothes off. We have two twenty-something daughters. I was done.
This was exactly the place where I switched away from Netflix. I realized that this Congressman was a psychopath, and that he was not representative of anything I saw on Capitol Hill. I was there only six months, and I was isolated in an office on the other side of the main office, but what I saw there was the normal run-of-the-mill bureaucracy that is the inevitable result of over-funding by the federal government.
If the money were not so gigantic, most of what goes on in Washington's political circles would be penny-ante stuff. It's mostly about raising enough money to get re-elected. There are undoubtedly lots of payoffs, but the main one is the promise of employment as a lobbyist after someone has finished his term in Congress. That's when he makes the big bucks. It's basically multibillion-dollar chiseling. It's not social pathology. It's what governments have done from day one. The difference is simply that the numbers are so big today.
Government is about four things: money, power, sex, and booze. Rare is the politician who is not affected by any of these four. Undoubtedly, some politicians get addicted to one or more of them. But that doesn't mean that he strangles dogs on the street.
I find it remarkable that Kevin Spacey is something of a psychopath. He played the part to the hilt. He did the same in the movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Also in The Usual Suspects. Also in American Beauty. I thought he was a great method actor. I was wrong.
REALISM VS. DEVIANCE
I don't like unrealistic dramas. I don't even like unrealistic comedies. I turned off Alpha House after five minutes for the same reason that I turned off House of Cards. It just was not realistic. It tried to be funny, but it failed. If humor is not grounded in realism, it isn't funny. This is why Mary Tyler Moore still holds up. Ted Baxter is funny because he is exaggerated. But everybody knows at least one insecure blowhard like Ted. This is why the exaggeration is funny. The same comment applies to Betty White's Sue Ann Nivens, although I don't think I've ever known anyone quite like her. But I can imagine somebody like her.
I also didn't watch the evening soap operas of the 1980's: Dallas and Dynasty. They made successful capitalists look crooked. Yet, all over the world, these two shows were wildly popular, especially Dallas. People loved to hate J.R. Ewing. I lived in Tyler. That was 90 minutes from Dallas. I never heard of anybody like J.R. Ewing. I remember all the hullabaloo in 1980 about "who shot JR?" That was the buzz around the world all through that summer. I had hoped that the shooter would turn out to be Nielsen. It wasn't. The show lasted another 11 years, and then, 21 years later, it was revived for two years.
One of the greatest scholars of all time was the founder of the sociology department at Harvard, Pitirim Sorokin. He was an extraordinary student of culture, and he had graduate students who did a lot of his work for him. He was convinced that we live in the final stage of what he called the sensate culture. This is a culture that is geared to science, economic comfort, and moral dissipation. He said that one of the marks of our culture is that the great works of literature focus on deviant people. In the spring of 1960, as a freshman, I took an upper division course in the history of American literature. As soon as we got to the 20th century, the deviants began to proliferate. We had to read all three volumes of Studs Lonigan. This is how Wikipedia describes the trilogy:
Farrell wrote these three novels at a time of national despair. During the Great Depression, many of America's most gifted writers and artists aspired to create a single, powerful work of art that would fully expose the evils of capitalism and lead to a political and economic overhaul of the American system. Farrell chose to use his own personal knowledge of Irish-American life on the South Side of Chicago to create a portrait of an average American slowly destroyed by the "spiritual poverty" of his environment. Both Chicago and the Irish-American Roman Catholic Church of that era are described at length, and faulted. Farrell describes Studs sympathetically as Studs slowly deteriorates, changing from a tough but fundamentally good-hearted, adventurous teenage boy to an embittered, physically shattered alcoholic.
We were also assigned the abominable novel, An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser was a drunk. So was F. Scott Fitzgerald. So was William Faulkner. I tried to read Absalom, Absalom!, but I stopped after one chapter. As I recall, I used Cliff's Notes to get through the thing. Apparently, we're supposed to revere Faulkner. I don't see any reason why we should. The second half of that course was probably the most wasted half a semester that I ever took.
I must admit that I think the best piece of acting that the great Robert Duval ever did was in a low-budget production of a Faulkner story, Tomorrow. It was a tightly focused story about a man who was not a deviant. He was not a drunk. He was a decent man with limited capabilities and limited goals. (The incomparable Horton Foote wrote the screenplay. When Foote and Duval teamed up, the results were spectacular. Think Tender Mercies.)
In my senior year course on the history of American literature for the Ron Paul Curriculum, after 1915, I do only movies. Hollywood until 1960 was run by Jewish moguls who were intensely patriotic, and they also understood what would sell to the American people. The movies were mostly uplifting. There were a few exceptions, such as The Grapes of Wrath, but they really were exceptions. There were gangster movies, of course, but the gangsters always wound up the way Jimmy Cagney wound up in Angels With Dirty Faces and White Heat: dead. There was moral cause and effect in Hollywood movies up until 1960. That changed with Elmer Gantry and Inherit the Wind.
I am not much on nostalgia. My attitude towards the past is similar to P.J. O'Rourke's. "When you hear the phrase 'the good old days,' think 'dentistry.'" But that is not true about American novels and post-1960 Hollywood movies. I also don't think it's true of 20th century literature in general. The much-heralded great novels of the 20th century have not been marked by uplift. They have focused on deviants. I don't see a lot of progress in highbrow literature. Things don't seem to be getting any better. American movies show that American storytelling is still the best in the world. But the content of the stories is too often deviant. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was even worse than Virginia Woolf.